The concrete example of this is the sandpile, where sand being piled up organizes itself into a little cone which contains within its structure inherent instability which might trigger a large avalanche upon the addition of a single grain of sand at some point--or might not.

The Shifting Sands of Power Delivery, from our Natural Science section, describes an attempt to model the complex processes of power transmission by an unlikely correlation: the physics of sandpile avalanches.

The parallel chip-firing game, also known as the discrete fixed-energy sandpile model, is an automaton on graphs in which vertices that have at least as many chips as incident edges "fire" chips to their neighbors.

On Old Main, a former motel turned nursing home is seeing a new incarnation as retirement apartments; just west of downtown's library, a new 12-unit, two-story townhouse complex overlooks the river; and then, of course, there's the Sandpile.

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